The White Rose told the Nazis, ‘We will not be silent.’ After 80 years, we must speak out, too
In late February 1943, 80 years ago, Munich university students Sophie Scholl and her older brother Hans, leaders of the small “White Rose” anti-Nazi resistance group, were subjected to a show trial by the “hanging judge” of the Third Reich and summarily beheaded.
Today, with threats to democracy ongoing, the message of the White Rose, as icons of civil courage, has never been more urgent for all of us — especially those more moderate Republicans in Congress who might silently agree, but haven’t found the courage to speak up.
Just five days before their execution, Hans and Sophie had entered the vast, empty atrium of the University of Munich 1700 with their sixth anti-Nazi leaflet. With students still in class, they quietly placed stacks outside classroom doors. Then, instead of escaping out the main entrance, they mounted the highest gallery they could reach. Just before the bell rang for the change of class, they pushed their remaining one hundred leaflets over the balustrade; they came floating down to the floor. The siblings were spotted, captured and turned over to the Gestapo.
Theirs was the only fundamental public protest by Germans against the Nazi regime ever to have been staged in the 12 years of Hitler’s rule.
Castigating the German middle class for complacently relinquishing its freedoms in support of a criminal regime, the White Rose was by all accounts the first to cry out against the Nazi mass murder of Europe’s Jews, calling it “a crime unparalleled in human history.”
“We will not be silent,” they said at the end of their fourth leaflet. “We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”
Today the principles of truth and decency have been attacked and democracy undermined in the United States — in ways both brazen and stealthy — as we face a normalizing of the far right and a world of reignited, reactionary culture wars.
The assault has been fueled Donald Trump’s politics of mendacity, resentment and aggression; buttressed by the outsize reach of Fox News; and escalated by a powerful, selfserving cadre of extremists and election deniers in Congress, even calling the shots. All this has become mainstream among a considerable number of misled citizens who have tolerated the emergence of a dangerous, neo-fascist popular movement.
Pandora’s Box has been swung open, and the evils have flown out. Belief in conspiracies, such as the “Great Replacement Theory,” abound, facilitated by social media, with antisemitism, among other hatreds, entering the public discourse to a degree such as we haven’t seen since the original radio shock-jockey Father Coughlin before World War II.
Trump aside, we already have other, potentially more pernicious, politicians to take his place, including Gov. DeSantis of Florida, with his promotion of racist policies, voter suppression, censorship and homophobia.
A politically charged Supreme Court has egregiously undermined our system of checks and balances, ignoring precedents and popular opinion, substituting right-wing political advocacy and personal beliefs in place of sound constitutional reasoning.
Therefore, it has been heartening to see two truth-tellers within the Republican Party, acting in the spirit of the White Rose: Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who were ostracized, vilified and threatened for their investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection, but persisted in their efforts to establish the truths their colleagues willfully abandoned. They are still role models, even now that they out of office.
Today we in the United States have the freedom, unlike those in Russia or Iran, to speak up and act without risking our lives. And unlike the lonely White Rose, there’s strength in numbers. With the 2024 presidential election looming and the stakes so high, can any other moderate Republicans be moved to emulate the White Rose today? Do they have the courage to “know and publicly declare,” restoring truth and conscience, as the exiled Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann said of the White Rose in a radio broadcast in 1943?
And can the rest of us who recognize the dangers find ever more effective ways to awaken those still slumbering?As the White Rose and history have shown us — we all had better do so, and not wait until it is too late for us as well.